Smuggler Queen

by Tim C. Taylor

  Smuggler Queen

  Chimera Company Book 4

  By

  By Tim C. Taylor

  PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books

  Copyright © 2021 Tim C. Taylor

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Cover Design by Vincent Sammy

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  Contents

  Chapter 1: Lily Hjon

  Chapter 2: Green Fish

  Chapter 3: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 4: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 5: Green Fish

  Chapter 6: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 7: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 8: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 9: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 10: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 11: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 12: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 13: KNS Studios

  Chapter 14: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 15: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 16: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 17: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 18: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 19: Roogyin

  Chapter 20: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 21: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 22: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 23: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 24: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 25: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 26: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 27: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 28: Green Fish

  Chapter 29: Izza Zan Fey

  Chapter 30: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 31: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 32: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 33: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 34: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 35: Lily Hjon

  Chapter 36: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 37: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 38: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 39: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 40: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 41: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 42: Hines “Bronze” Zy Pel

  Chapter 43: Hines “Bronze” Zy Pel

  Chapter 44: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 45: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 46: Vetch Arunsen

  Chapter 47: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 48: L1-iN/x “LYNX”

  Chapter 49: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 50: Maycey

  Chapter 51: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 52: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 53: Justiana Fregg

  Chapter 54: Osu Sybutu

  Chapter 55: Justiana Fregg

  Chapter 56: Tavistock Fitzwilliam

  Chapter 56: Osu Sybutu

  About Tim C. Taylor

  Author’s Note

  Looking for the Latest in Scifi Goodness?

  Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War

  Excerpt from Devil Calls the Tune

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  Chapter 1: Lily Hjon

  Hundra-7

  Lily satisfied herself that her gauntlets and boots would hold her fast against the contours of the ice cliff and that her center of gravity was safely over her footholds. Only then did she allow herself a few moments of rest.

  How far had she climbed?

  Halfway?

  She glanced behind her, hoping to see Ghost Shark standing on the leveled ground of the shore of the methane lake.

  But she couldn’t. Her suit was rated for hostile environments, and the bulky helmet wouldn’t let her head turn that far. Maybe its designers regarded that as a feature, not a flaw. What you couldn’t see couldn’t terrorize you.

  She should be able to set up a rear camera view in her HUD, but until she trained the suit’s rudimentary intelligence to learn her voice, it was far too irritating to use.

  She tightened her grip further—though her fingers dug no deeper because the water-ice of the cliff was hard as granite at this temperature—and twisted her torso so she could look down to the cliff’s base.

  The rocky ground was littered with dirty water-ice boulders that shimmered and blurred. This was the effect of the petrochemical smog. It reduced the visual spectrum to a narrow band running all the way from rusty water to stale nicotine.

  Despite the smeared visuals, she confidently judged she had ascended about 250 feet.

  That was good. She’d made it a little better than halfway.

  But when she looked up, she felt a kick of worry. The cliff had been so sharply defined when they had looked up from the valley floor. From her ledge, the summit was hidden in the smog. The cliff appeared to go on forever. Worse, her climbing companion had disappeared too.

  “Activate comms! Captain, I have lost eyes on you. What’s your status, over?”

  “Activating cooling system.”

  “No, you stupid suit. Cancel cooling!”

  “Warning! Ambient temperature is 108 Kelvin.”

  “I know. It’s as cold as the Second Hell. Cancel cooling system!”

  “Comm system not active. Warning! Ambient temperature is 108 Kelvin. Danger of death.”

  Lily took a moment to calm herself. 108 Kelvin. That was around -160 Celsius. They were numbers on scales named after long dead Earth people—men, most likely—that represented a sweltering heat in comparison with the vacuum of deep space she was more used to. There was a crucial difference. Space was a perfect insulator, which meant the environmental controls spent more time preventing you from boiling in your suit than keeping you warm. But here on Hundra-7, the atmosphere was soupy thick. And that meant you could lose heat all too quickly.

  Her cheeks burned with cold, and her fingers were numbing. Not good 250 feet up a cliff face.

  She wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Sybutu had trained in the suit until the captain had asked her to take his place, just before leaving the ship.

  Lily puffed out her chest and tried to emulate the clipped growl of the Legion sergeant.

  “Cancel cooling system!”

  “Cooling system canceled.”

  A gentle warmth blew over her face. Heat spread through her gauntlets.

  She was still enjoying it when her helmet beeped.

  “Everything all right, Hjon?” enquired a cheerful voice.

  “Just taking a breather, sir.”

  “While I understand the temptation to stop and take vacation snaps of the strange worlds we visit, you should resist the urge until after we finish the job.”

  “Roger that, sir,” she replied through gritted teeth. She raised one hand, dislodging a cloud of the powdery hydrocarbon snow that coated the ice cliff, before closing her grip around a higher handhold.

  “And less of the sir, Lily. I don’t want my team to sound too military.”

  “Don’t think Sergeant Sybutu has received that memo yet, Captain.” She pushed up the cliff, not pausing for breath this time. She was determined to catch up with the space mountain goat of a captain.

  “Would it help if I throw rope down to you?”

  Yes, it would, she th
ought. “Not necessary,” was what she said.

  She was making rapid progress now. The cliff was steep, but there were plenty of routes that weren’t sheer vertical faces and overhangs. Confidence mattered, she decided. Fitz had it in this situation. She didn’t. Not yet.

  Soon, he emerged from the dirty clouds. He dangled one-handed from an overhanging ledge and was observing her progress.

  She slowed, just for a moment, and tried to firm her thoughts about this man so they would stay still and make sense.

  This was an inhospitable environment. An unrepaired suit breach would kill them long before they could get back to the ship. And yet, the annoying show off was dangling off a cliff. Then there was the way he’d drugged his jacks back on Eiylah-Bremah to put them where he wanted while he went off on an interstellar tangent. That should have left Sybutu and his men wanting to slit Fitz’s throat, and yet, they hadn’t.

  There was something special about him. It was very difficult to dislike Captain Fitz, no matter how much you wanted to.

  Perhaps the environment suit was protecting her from his aura because she didn’t trust him now.

  One last scramble, and she’d be with him. She reached for the next handhold.

  She half felt, half heard her foothold ledge snap. Then she was dropping three hundred feet to the valley floor below.

  Momentarily, she was confused by the slowness with which she fell in the 0.37g. She swung both hands forward, fingers outstretched, and rammed them into the cliff face.

  They slid on the greasy petrochemical snow…and came away. Now, she was not only falling but tumbling backward!

  She tucked her lower legs behind her as best she could in the cumbersome suit and activated the thruster pack control panel beneath her left wrist. It wasn’t voice-activated. In fact, it used the same interface she was familiar with from a regular spacesuit.

  When the puff of reaction gas buoyed her up, she directed it to nudge her onto the cliff. She reached out and gently slid down the sooty ice until her toes found a narrow ledge, and she was once more secure.

  She prayed silently, not really sure to whom she was directing her prayers. Not the Immortal Empress of the Legion cult, that was for sure.

  Her eyes closed as she waited for her heart to cease pounding. Don’t say a word, Captain. She wasn’t in the mood for one of Fitz’s quips.

  But his reply wasn’t spoken. When she looked up, a rope was dangling just above her head.

  “It’s secure,” Fitz told her. He had disappeared in the smoke once more. “Trust me.”

  Sweat ran down into Lily’s eyes. She blinked it away, but that only stung, and there was no way to wipe it clear.

  Doesn’t look like I have a choice, she mused and reached for the rope.

  * * *

  Lily cursed the captain as she used the rope to pull herself up. The higher she climbed, though, the more she redirected her curses toward Lord Khallini. They were on Hundra-7 to give him the same information about the buried mystery ship they’d used to get Nyluga-Ree off their backs. The Hundra system was uninhabited, so she wondered why they couldn’t have tight-beamed the data from orbit. Even if you accepted the need to deliver the data in person, Ghost Shark could have deposited them closer to the coordinates Khallini called home, but the sorcerer had made them park a ways out and come to him on foot.

  On this, at least, Lily couldn’t fault the captain, because Lord Khallini was the kind of person who didn’t need to explain himself.

  When she pulled herself to the summit, her grumbling faded.

  The view from the top was astonishing.

  It was also daunting.

  She’d reached a dirty-yellow ice plateau. It gently descended to dunes that rose like enormous toffee embankments from a sea of oily rust flakes. Compared with Earth (a planet no one had set foot on for thousands of years, but was still the yardstick for most measurements), the gravitational pull trying to flatten the dunes was weak, allowing them to rise hundreds of feet into the smog. Prevailing winds blew them so they ran transverse to the route she and Fitz needed to take. Without a detour of a hundred klicks or more, the only way ahead was over the top, and she could see at least three rows of dunes.

  Beyond them, something glinted in the distance. She hoped it was the methane river they’d seen as they descended in the ship, but it was difficult to tell in the haze.

  For the first time, Lily began to wonder whether she could make it that far.

  “I admit,” said Fitz, “I didn’t think the dunes looked like much of an obstacle when I saw them from Ghost Shark. But now that I see them in the flesh…” He drew a sharp breath.

  “That sounds about right,” Lily said with a chuckle. “With our luck, ‘in the flesh’ won’t be a figure of speech. Those dunes will be living organisms. Woman-eating carnivores we’ll sink into and be slowly digested over weeks.”

  “Oh, dear. I hadn’t considered that.”

  Shit! Fitz sounded genuinely scared.

  “You mean like the badlands of Psonex-43?” he asked. “Except the rock trolls of that benighted place keep their victims paralyzed, but alive, for decades. Meanwhile, their half-mineral, half-organic offspring grow within their victims’ flesh.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Am I? These dunes won’t hurt you, Hjon. Catkins got me the readout on the way down. They are this world’s equivalent of snow dunes. Amino acids, ammonia, propane, adenine, esters, and lipids galore—a frozen primordial soup passed through a grinder. They won’t hurt you. Not unless you feel a sudden urge to emulate Bronze and take up smoking.”

  Lily strode down the long slope toward the first dune. “Quit yacking and suck it up. I’ve had my share of pointless physical training, and I bet you have too, boss.”

  “In my youth, perhaps.” Fitz bounded forward to catch up. He kept pace, a companionable distance to one side.

  They walked the first klick in silence. Even in his heavy-duty environment suit, Fitz radiated cheerfulness. What was it about him? When she wasn’t paying attention, she’d started to like him for no reason she could explain. She began to wonder whether she was being drugged or whether she was caught in a subtle form of mind control. Maybe likeability was his special mutant power?

  As her explanations became more outlandish, the sound of her breathing and the deep churning rumble of the suit’s life-support systems grew louder.

  The walk was easy. Gravity was low, the hydrocarbon snow was a shallow covering over hard ice, and although the suit didn’t have muscle amplification, its energy return system was highly efficient.

  “Why am I here, Captain?” Immediately, she felt relief at having broken the silence.

  “Because no one could wish for a finer companion, Hjon.”

  Lily found herself laughing at the teasing in Fitz’s bullshit. “No, really. Sybutu is the senior Marine. He was supposed to come with you until you changed your mind at the last moment. Zavage has his…mind-reading tentacle lumps. Bronze is a spy who knows more than he’s letting on. I think we all know the same could be said for Enthree, and Colonel Lantosh left to wage her own secret war. That leaves just me and Darant. I have the tattoo. He has the goat. So why me?”

  “The decision was not last moment.”

  “Well, no one told…Oh, I get it. It’s a stupid test. Get me off balance and see how I perform.”

  “The way you put it, I sound like some kind of monster.” Fitz cleared his throat. “My apologies, Hjon. Sybutu gave me a stern talking to about my having to earn trust. More than once. I have much to learn too.”

  “That’s very true, but you haven’t explained why you picked me.”

  “We need to retrieve Vetch from Nyluga-Ree’s sweaty clutches. And we shall succeed. What then? Sergeant Osu Sybutu and Sergeant Vetch Arunsen. Compare and contrast as potential leaders of my Marine contingent.”

  Lily found herself chuckling again. How did Fitz put her at such ease? “They’re twins. Mirror images. Sybutu is a r
amrod straight jack with a buzz cut, dark skin, and Legion to the core. Vetch is the palest human I’ve ever known who wasn’t ill. He’s irreverent and defiant, and his beard is bejeweled. For the past two years, coaching him to be the best NCO in the Militia has been my side project. Sybutu is Vetch’s Legion equivalent, without my mentoring. They’re two rounds from the same clip. Everyone can see it but them. In fact, they’re too similar. They will butt heads with each other no matter who’s in charge. They can’t help it. Making them joint squad leaders would be even worse. Which means…”

  Lily halted. She could feel her boots sink into the smog snow.

  It felt like a bad omen when the skies chose that moment to drop fat blobs of methane rain, which carved streaks through the smog and splattered against her faceplate.

  “You see my problem,” Fitz said.

  “I’m not commanding anything. I’m Trooper Lily Hjon, and that’s how it’s going to be.”

  “Face it, Hjon, you were hung out to dry by the Militia and publicly humiliated for the encouragement of others. After the events on Eiylah-Bremah, I think we can say that, among our many other problems, you and the other Raven Company survivors are considered traitors and deserters. I expect the jacks are too.”

  “The thought has crossed my mind. I can’t ever go back.”

  “To the Militia, no. As for coming in from the outlaw cold, that’s a different matter. You’ve seen bad people thrive because they cover their tracks by pulling strings. Well, good people can do it too…if they have the right friends.”

  “You mean Lord Khallini?”

  “Possibly. I haven’t pasted it all together yet. However, we’ve joined up with people who believe they have the power to seize control of the entire Federation. They will protect their assets. That includes you. I believe you were a fine officer once, Hjon. I want you as my Marine commander. Think about it.”

  “If I say no?”

  “I believe it will be time for Hubert the Goat to show the galaxy what he can do.”